France - Post 14 - Ecuador!

Hey everyone,

This post is more experience and not so much French related. 

I wanted to talk about how I had the pleasure to meet several Ecuadorians Wednesday through Maura. One was an actual friend of hers, Kevin, and the others were family (two cousins, aunt, uncle). For those of you who haven’t read enough posts to know who Maura is, she is a Spanish intern who works with me at the NGO with the younger kids. She didn’t go to work Wednesday because of school obligations and so the three of us met up after at L’Arc de Triomph.

(For those of you who don’t know the business of this area, I would not recommend making this a rendezvous point unless you are very well familiarized with it because of the setup. This is a huge round a bout with six or seven different directions. To make it more convenient for the people, there are six or seven different ways to exit from the metro line, Charles de Gaulle. In short, you need to know the exits, the road names, and your basic directions to not get lost.)

From there we hopped on a bus and went over to meet with Kevin’s cousin and some locals to play ball in a park near both their houses around Place de Clichy for a couple hours. After that we went over to his cousins house where they served us dinner and we got to talk with the family for several more hours. I felt immediately welcomed into their house despite having met their nephew only a few hours prior. I learned that the aunt is from Guayaquil also and the uncle is from Loja (another city south of Quito closer to the board of Peru). I got to hear about their personal experiences here in France over the past year, how they had lived for 12 years in Spain before, how they were trying to pick up French to be better communicate, and how they were teaching their child of 3 years to be bilingual by exposing her to the culture in bits and pieces. It was nice since there did not pass a single moment where one of us was not talking until they decided to go to bed and we all took over the living room to play some video games. For me it was wonderful finding a little piece of Ecuador in Paris even though Kevin is heading out to New Jersey this weekend for the summer so I won’t be seeing him again until Ecuador possibly. Just a quick little story there and tomorrow I will be writing longer in depth post about deals and bargains you can get despite most things being pretty expensive (this is coming from the point of view of a poor college student though but the deals are deals regardless of your situation).

Now I'll leave you guys with some picture I have taken just in passing with my phone from before and a subtitle.

Thanks for reading and until next post!

 (Basilique Du Sacre-Coeur)

I went here on my lunch break for some baguette and cheese on Wednesday but have not entered yet. It was very busy and I did not have time but stories will follow.

 (The fountain down from the Basílica)

(The view a couple levels down from the Basílica)